A HISTORY OF SCIENCE 



placed down the centre of this room. Perhaps it is 

 not too much to speak of this collection as the 

 most extraordinary set of documents of all the rare 

 treasures of the British Museum, for it includes not 

 books alone, but public and private letters, busi- 

 ness announcements, marriage contracts in a word, 

 all the species of written records that enter into 

 the every-day life of an intelligent and cultured com- 

 munity. 



But by what miracle have such documents been pre- 

 served through all these centuries? A glance makes 

 the secret evident. It is simply a case of time-defying 

 materials. Each one of these Assyrian documents 

 appears to be, and in reality is, nothing more or less 

 than an inscribed fragment of brick, having much the 

 color and texture of a weathered terra-cotta tile of 

 modern manufacture. These slabs are usually oval 

 or oblong in shape, and from two or three to six or 

 eight inches in length and an inch or so in thickness. 

 Each of them was originally a portion of brick-clay, 

 on which the scribe indented the flights of arrow- 

 heads with some sharp - cornered instrument, after 

 which the document was made permanent by baking. 

 They are somewhat fragile, of course, as all bricks are, 

 and many of them have been more or less crumbled in 

 the destruction of the palace at Nineveh; but to the 

 ravages of mere time they are as nearly invulnerable 

 as almost anything in nature. Hence it is that these 

 records of a remote civilization have been preserved 

 to us, while the similar records of such later civiliza- 

 tions as the Grecian have utterly perished, much as 

 the flint implements of the cave-dweller come to us 



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